Actually a large part of the diet was eating carrion....carnivore leftovers...which explains why there's nothing like a ribeye that's been "aged' for 80 days

From what understand, the short lifespan on hunter-gatherers is a myth: if they didn't die young from some infectious disease as child, they lived almost as long as people do today, and much longer than agricultural folks did before modern medicine. Don't forget: life expectancy is an average.

I have a book on edible wild plants. It's really amazing what you can eat. Lots of leaves are edible, and so are a lot of roots, which are more calorie dense. Pretty much every part of a cattail (those big plants that look like poop) is edible, and those grow all around lakes. Mushrooms too. Chicken of the forest can be huge and would provide a lot of sustenance.

Magorn:amquelbettamin: So wait. If I eat mostly carbs I'll be insulin resistant, mostly fats I'll have heart disease, and apparently too much protein leads to 'nitrogen poisoning' according to TFA.

Weird, almost as if some sort of balance is key for an omnivore. Still the nitrogen poisoning thing is a bit overblown as your liver can apparently quickly adapt to help out in that dept, though the discussion of this article elsewhere did lead me to the fascinating phenomenon of "rabbit starvation", where people can starve and develop intense hunger and cravings for fat if they subsist entirely on lean meats

There are a couple of essential fatty acids people cannot make themselves. Miss either one too long and the insulation of your nerves gets crappy and so on from recycling them into the related compounds the body builds from them (which is why they're essential, duh).

The study is silly. If salmon are in abundance grizzly bears will eat the fat, skin and organs and leave the protein rich flesh for the birds. Just because cavemen didn't eat as much protein as is commonly portrayed doesn't mean they didn't get most of their nutrients from eating animals. It seems like the problem is that they are using the modern human concept of eating meat which usually means eating lean muscle tissue with the fat trimmed off.

I would like to see an explanation of how cavemen were able to find enough wild growing, abundant and widespread enough vegetation that they were able to make it a large part of their diets. Given how widespread humans were even in our caveman days you can be sure there were some groups that ate more or less vegetation and more of less meat depending on their environment. But you don't just walk out and find a field of carrots and sweet potatoes growing in the wilderness, fruits are in season for a few weeks at a time, most vegetation cannot be digested by humans so might come across an occasionally edible root, berry or herb but nothing that would actually sustain even an individual, never mind a whole family or group.

casual disregard:I'd like to introduce more vegetables into my diet, but they are by and large farking disgusting. I can eat green onions and various peppers in moderation. That's about it. Help?

Take any vegetable, cut into bite size pieces, put in a bowl and cover with olive oil or coconut oil, sprinkle with salt, and then roast on a cookie sheet at 450*F until golden brown. Don't crowd the pan, let them breathe. I swear this makes everything mouthwatering good - even brussel sprouts (cut in half). Onions, carrots, peppers, eggplant, broccoli, and parsnips all work really well.

Really, no one caught that at the end? The comparison was to the first farmers, 12,000 years ago? How the fark is a farmer 12,000 years ago a caveman? And then it mentions Inuits and tosses away the fact that they do (still today) eat a majority animal based diet with....well they eat a lot of fat too! As if Cavemen didn't also eat the fat of the animals they killed. Fat is where the flavor is and observation of indigenous cultures has shown over and over again that when humans take game they eat the fat preferentially (and usually the offal too despite recently developed food aversions to offal in Western culture).....on account of it tasting better. Fat is where the flavor is. Red meat, devoid of fat isn't translated into a particularly yummy experience by our brains.

Very few people actually enjoy non-marbled, super lean meat. The brain is hardwired to like fatty and sweet things. If your wiring is different you are an anomaly. Congrats, your brain is a little different. But, for most humans fat was and still is consumed preferentially in hunter-gatherer diets. Inuits are not special because they eat fat. They just have more access to it because where they live the animals carry more fat. But, humans all over the globe throughout our eons of evolution have loved them some tasty animals. Because animal flesh is generally a nice mix of fat and protein.

amquelbettamin:So wait. If I eat mostly carbs I'll be insulin resistant, mostly fats I'll have heart disease, and apparently too much protein leads to 'nitrogen poisoning' according to TFA.

Weird, almost as if some sort of balance is key for an omnivore. Still the nitrogen poisoning thing is a bit overblown as your liver can apparently quickly adapt to help out in that dept, though the discussion of this article elsewhere did lead me to the fascinating phenomenon of "rabbit starvation", where people can starve and develop intense hunger and cravings for fat if they subsist entirely on lean meats